


I'll Love You For A Thousand More

by CaptainLaserBeam



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Canon Death, Canon Divergence, Crack Pairing, Crack Treated Seriously, God of War - Freeform, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Heartbreak, Hurt/Comfort, I Will Go Down With This Ship, Interspecies Relationship, Kissing, M/M, Mentions of Myth & Folklore, OC, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Previous Relationship, Pro-Diana, Time Freeze, Time Loop, Tragic Romance, World War I, greek fucking tragedy, handjobs, not Wonder Woman bashing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-07
Updated: 2017-06-07
Packaged: 2018-11-10 02:27:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,771
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11117964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaptainLaserBeam/pseuds/CaptainLaserBeam
Summary: Before he was a spy, before he'd stolen a book and flown a busted plane through a portal to another dimension full of Amazons, Steve was just a soldier.And before Diana had ever seen a man, Ares had seen him first. He would be there to see him last.





	I'll Love You For A Thousand More

**Author's Note:**

> Lots of feels, lots of tragic. 
> 
> I loved Wonder Woman and I loved Diana with all of my heart. She and Trevor were adorable but there was something in the plot that I noticed that no one else seemed to. Ares knew Steve before Diana did. 
> 
> I don't know where this came from, but I had a ticket for this ship and I got on to ride. I'll wave at you all from the shore.
> 
> *the name Marcos means 'like Mars' or 'warlike'. I bet he did this a lot, cause I mean, I would.

He'd done it. 

There was no one left alive on the plane but Steve. Him, and nearly a thousand, live artillery shells of the deadliest gas the world had ever seen. It was crazy, it was stupid, it was the right thing to do...and Steve tried hard not to let the panic of his situation settle in, but this was it. This was how it ended. Everything he'd worked for, everything he'd fought and bled and sacrificed, would conclude in an inferno of poison that killed no one. No one but him. 

Steve closed his eyes. He saw her smiling, that beautiful angel that had rescued, protected, and fought for him on an island that was as impossible a place as it was its people. That woman had believed with all of her fierce heart that she would end all war. Diana; innocent, righteous, the embodiment of strength. Fighting a battle miles below him that only she could, and that he would never fully understand.

He felt himself calm, her visage ever clear. Steve felt guilty as he moved his hand to carefully take hold of the gun at his side. There was so much he'd never told her. So much that he'd been unwilling to admit while the strength of her purpose had led them forward. He'd used her, he knew. The Allied powers were just as guilty as the Central powers of innocent casualties. They were just as terrible, and Steve had known bringing Doctor Maru's book to his superiors wasn't for the reasons he'd told her. Steve was certain they'd use it. Certain they'd hand it all over to the thinktanks and scientists that would continue to develop more and more weapons to use against their enemies. He believed in saving those who could not save themselves, but it was at a high cost to his conscience that had probably cost him his soul. 

Things started slowing down around him. Steve could hear the engines of the giant war plane rumble, the multiple propellers on either side laden thick with ammunition that surrounded him like an impenetrable trench of poison. He thought of his men. The small group of brave, terrified, discounted soldiers who were too poor and too pariah to be anything but what they could be to survive. Steve wasn't their leader, not really. He was just as lost and desperate. Just as traumatized, but with a fancy title and a fancy uniform that disguised his cowardice. They were better men than he was. She was better than any of them. This was how it needed to end. 

Steve raised the gun, his eyes opening as he felt them sting with regret. This horrible poison, the very thing he'd been fighting to destroy, would now be his and his alone. It had taken something from him that he couldn't compensate for. Someone else that had once fought at his side just as fiercely as Diana. Someone who had disappeared into a cloud of mustard gas and never reappeared. The face behind his eyelids was of that beautiful warrior angel, but the face that was tucked into his memories...he no longer existed. 

The sounds around him slowed further, beating in time with his heart as he filled his lungs with the last pure air he'd ever know. He'd told her he loved her, and he wasn't lying. It was true, he always would. But he wasn't doing this for her.

Steve closed his eyes again and smiled, his finger pulling the trigger. 

Everything stopped. 

It took a few seconds for Steve to realize that he was holding his breath. He gasped, every part of his body shaking with adrenaline, but immobile in the cockpit seat of the plane. He let his arms drop, both with the gun and from the controls of the plane. The clouds weren't moving, the propellers were frozen in place like every engine had instantly stalled them. At the same time. Steve's breathing trembled and seemed to echo. Was this how it worked? Was he trapped here, in his final moments, forever?

"No...please no..." he gasped out, the gun falling to the floor and clattering with a clang that made him jump in the otherwise silent plane. Steve turned to glance back at the bombs, expecting them to be exploding any second now, but finding them intact. He looked to the sky in front of the plane in confusion before his mind clicked back into capable function and he realized he'd seen something else. Something impossible. 

Steve turned back again, his eyes taking in the sight of a man standing where none had been before. He was in a thick coat that Steve recognized. The fur lined, military coat of a Captain, wrapped snugly over arms that crossed a chest covered in rags. It was so familiar, so achingly real looking that Steve felt his throat close. The dark skin, the deep and determined stare of a man who'd seen too much for too long. A dead man, just like Steve. 

"She didn't deserve you, you know."

He heard the words and the deep, rumbling voice, but Steve could hardly believe his own eyes, let alone his ears. The man wasn't looking at him, his gaze focusing on something that Steve couldn't see, and his words gave him a sudden flashback to the last time Diana had seen her mother. She'd said nearly the same thing. 

For the second time in what felt like days, Steve felt compelled to ask, "Am I..." he coughed to clear his constricted throat. It didn't really work. "Am I dead?"

"No." The voice was calm, and kind, but sad. Thick with a familiar French accent. 

"Then how...?" Steve released himself from the pilot seat, nearly tumbling to the still floor. "...I don't..." Nothing made sense anymore. 

"Not yet."

Steve blinked as something glinted at him just to the right of his delusion. Something small, suspended in mid air and halfway between him and the deadly missiles that would kill him. A bullet. 

So many impossible things kept happening that a part of Steve just accepted it. Understood that this was the lingering moment between life and death that stretched to infinity and showed him everything he would ever be guilty of. The most he'd ever regret. 

"Marcos." Steve said quietly, his eyes moving back to the figure like it was made of porcelain in a museum. "You...I..." What could he say? After so long, and so many conversations he'd gone over in his head for a moment exactly like this, it was suddenly all escaping him like sand through his fingers. 

"I never thought it would be you." The man, the soldier, Marcos, said, his dark eyes still cast downward. "I knew she'd come, some day, some year, some century. But I didn't think you'd be the one to deliver her. It has been so long...and somehow I can still be fooled by coincidence."

Steve's eyes narrowed as he shakily pulled himself to his feet. The stillness of the plane in mid air was nauseating, and the bullet remained suspended on its journey to a fiery death, but Steve focused solely on what he'd longed to see for years. He was barely registering what was being said, as it made little to no sense, but so far Marcos was still standing there. Breathing, alive. 

"They never found you." He said, the first coherent sentence he could form. "After...after it all cleared. They looked for hours. I looked for days!" Steve swallowed hard, a rock sitting in his throat threatening to block the rest of his words. "I stayed in Belgium as long as I could, but we had to...they wouldn't let me..." He couldn't finish, it made his chest ache like it was all happening again. The strange smoke, the screams and the terror. Men dropping around him like they'd been shot, but clawing at their throats and faces instead. Marcos had been right beside him, yelling back to Sameer and Charlie to stay where they were. To run. Cursing in French. It had all been so confusing and terrifying that Steve was sure he wasn't going to make it. Their defense was being devastated, by what all appearances, seemed to be fog. But it was so, so much worse.

"You have to understand, Steve."

_At the time, Marcos had barreled into him, knocking the both of them to the ground as it crept in on all sides. Like a ghost, trapping them in._

"This is my nature. My instinct."

_Something was shoved into his hands, rubber and foreign, a mask that Marcos alone had been carrying. None of them had ever asked him why he'd picked it up or why he'd taken it everywhere._

"War is not just something I experience, it is what I am. It flows through my veins and twists and changes as predictably as the tide."

_Frightened blue eyes had met dark ones, Steve trying hard not to scream as Marcos lay atop him, thrusting the mask into his hands. Urging him to put it on his face as Steve argued silently with panicked limbs._

"This was something new. Something I had heard of but hadn't seen...and I had to, Steve. I just...I needed to see it, to feel it."

_Then warm lips had met his, freezing him in place as he felt, if only for a moment, something burning through him that wasn't poison. A fire that was both new and familiar. Ancient but ever-changing. He forgot everything, for that small moment, where memories surfaced of hunger and cold and a closeness driven by desperation. A weakness that had turned into an infatuation before becoming something else entirely._

"But I couldn't let it have you."

_It was over as quickly as it began, lips pulled away as Marcos had forced the mask over Steve's face. The fog rolled over like water, filling every crevice and drowning the both of them in a terrifying nothing that was killing everything it touched. Steve stared at Marcos in horror. It would kill him too. Any second now and he was going to see the man die in front of his face; on top of him. But before he could do anything, before he could rip the mask from his face and give it back to its owner, the weight was suddenly gone. In the blink of an eye, stinging tears filling his already impaired vision from the bit of smoke that had grazed him, Marcos had disappeared. Steve's hands jerked forward into the fog but touched nothing in all directions. He could see himself, his hands reaching, and only a few feet around him. In all directions, there was nothing but death._

"You saved my life." Steve said quietly, feeling the tear on his face before he could stop it as he was brought back to the present. 

"You..." Then something clicked. His words, his steps, his thought process halted, slowly starting to register what Marcos had said, and was saying. What it all really meant. 

As if registering this sudden change, Marcos finally looked at him. 

He was exactly the same, as if he had transported himself from that devastating day to this very moment with no time in between. The same torn clothes beneath the coat that Steve had given him. The same weapons strapped around his waist and shoulders. The same lightened scars decorating his dark skin. Everything was perfect from memory...except for his eyes. Those dark irises that Diana had reminded him of, the warm brown that had gazed at him in longing, in passion and finally, in sadness. 

Now they were inflamed. 

"You're Ares." Steve said, and it wasn't a question. It was a realization. A culmination of everything that had happened in the time they'd shared, the loss he'd suffered, and the mission that Diana had been so passionately possessive of. It all connected. 

The flames brightened, giving an eerie glow that made Marcos look otherworldly and extremely old. It was the same kind of glow that he'd seen from a distance, fighting his way to a plane filled with death as Diana fought her own battle. Steve hadn't actually seen who she was fighting, but he'd learned enough at that point to know how strong she was. So if something was throwing her that far and that hard, there were only so many conclusions he could come to. She'd found who she was looking for. 

He glanced toward a window of the plane, one that was facing closer to the ground and was glowing brightly with fire frozen in place far below. Like a bomb that was in the process of exploding but hadn't quite reached that point yet. The unspoken question must have been visible on his face because Marcos looked too, that same sadness in his expression that was burned into Steve's memory. 

"Diana was always destined to fight me. To come here from where they'd hidden her away and remove me from this place. Finally."

Steve looked back to him; that beautiful profile, the infatuation suddenly making sense.

"If you're...who is she...how..." Too many questions merged into one. What was Diana? What was he? Who was she fighting and why...why was this happening and not happening at the same time. The bullet glistened a few feet away. 

"She will be victorious, as she was created to be. I was so much younger here, so angry, so incensed. She had not just come to kill me, she had somehow drawn you to her, just as I once did."

Steve remembered how they'd met. They were going to kill him, the small group of Russian soldiers lined up to fire at the solitary, dark skinned Frenchman. He'd been beaten, blindfolded and tied to a tree, their laughter drawing the attention of the young lieutenant he'd been at the time. They never saw them coming, Charlie on one side and Chief on the other, sniping them one by one within seconds of each other. Steve had untied the beaten man and caught him as he fell, lighter than he should have been for a man his size and obviously starved, but still strong. He removed the blindfold and used it to cover a slowly oozing wound on his cheek, glancing him over for more injuries before looking back at his face. Unexpectedly, the man looked completely pissed off. At Steve. 

"You'd wanted to be shot." Steve suddenly realized, long after the fact. "The French army was on its way-you...they would have found you...if we hadn't gotten there first." And it all made a strange kind of sense. He hadn't met Marcos that day, he'd met Ares. The god of War. The voice that whispered and instigated and inspired violence, just as Diana had said. Steve felt ill. 

"I have never pretended to be anything but what I am, Steve." Marcos said softly, meeting his eyes again. They were brown.

"Why were you..." Steve paused, unsure how to correctly word everything he suddenly needed to know. "If you're different down there right now...someone else...if you can choose what you want to be...then why? Why this? You're a- you were a- soldier. A pawn, a piece of meat with a gun. Why weren't you a general? A king? Someone more important than..."

"A spy?"

Steve's eyes narrowed. He'd become a spy himself after Marcos had gone missing. Presumed dead. It was like picking up the mantle that had been dropped, or in his case, placed on his face to save his life. After surviving the Western Front, when he wasn't even supposed to be there, he'd immediately been supported by British Intelligence to his superiors in The States. Especially by...one in particular...

"You changed. After you disappeared in Belgium, you didn't stay like this, did you." Steve felt reality splitting around him. There was an energy revolving and circulating around the plane. A bubble of safety that was losing its juice. 

Marcos was Ares again. Those eyes mirroring a millennia's worth of siege and destruction. 

"I will always change. I am War."

Steve glanced back at the inferno glowing from below. Remembering the strange figure he'd seen, surrounded in metal and flames. Diana had been fighting him...there'd been screams and lightning. Disaster raining down on them all, but not a direct attack on anyone else. Steve knew what that looked like. Those two powerful creatures were fighting each other. 

"That's you, as War. This you...this wasn't." He said it so matter of factly, so sure of himself, that even he was surprised. The fire vanished from those eyes and Marcos' arms unfolded from his chest. The first real movement he'd made since he appeared. He stepped towards Steve, a strange, icy trail following him like a second shadow. The smell of ozone and petrichor filled Steve's lungs and it was so achingly familiar; a sense memory. He realized belatedly that he wasn't afraid, and didn't move when Marcos reached a hand out to touch his face. It was warmer than he expected. 

"I tried to stay close to you." He stood face to face with Steve, nearly the same height yet somehow still towering over him. His deep voice echoing in the cavernous plane of death. "Every instinct I had was telling me to push you away. To use this new tool, as I have for every war, to its fullest extent."

"You told them how to make this?"

"No. I told them how to use it."

"Why?" Steve's chest ached, and Marcos' other hand was on his face, framing it gently with course fingers. Skin that was rough, calloused and abused, just like his.

"I won't apologize for what I am. My father created me this way, then punished me for it. He made Diana to kill me. I've been angry at this place for a very long time, yet your kind continue to worship me century after century and keep me here. I am War, they do not wish for me to stop."

"Then stop yourself."

Marcos faltered, suddenly looking very human and more like the starved Frenchman that Steve would have given his life for. Had fought beside, against what they called the enemy. There was a rumble through the plane, like it was trying to force itself back to life. The bullet shifted. 

"It is not a choice. I can't."

"You did. For a time, however brief. You were something that wasn't a part of this, and I saw it. We were all a part of war, but it wasn't who we were. Hell, I was a farmer, Sameer was an actor, Charlie had a family, and you...you can't tell me that all of you was War. Not in those trenches. Not with me. I've seen Diana in a trench and she couldn't stay there, she was compelled to fight a-and to save people! To force those bullets back at their guns and destroy them! That was War, that was what happens when someone who is filled entirely with anger is put into a trench and told there was no way out of it, and that is NOT what you did!"

The hands shifted, quick as lightning from Steve's face to his neck, clenching into the tender skin with enough pressure to nearly close off his airway. His hands flew up and clenched into wrists of pure iron, scrambling for purchase as he felt the flames of a god scalding his very soul. It was like the burning rope that the Amazons had wrapped him in, skewering his thoughts and pulling all of his weaknesses to the surface. Steve choked. 

"Even now, after all this time, I anger-" he growled, teeth clenched and eyes scorching. "Knowing what you believed of me, and these memories that you cursed me with! I am not that Amazon child, Steve Trevor, and I will not be judged by such naivety!"

Steve felt the blurring at the edges of his vision before he saw it. A darkness creeping in from the lack of oxygen, choking the life from him. Still somehow, he wasn't afraid. Not only had he willingly placed himself into a plane filled with highly deadly, flammable bombs, but this also wasn't the first time Marcos had choked him. In fact, it's what he'd done the first time they'd met. 

A small sound left his pale lips that was vaguely like a laugh and Ares released him like he'd been burned. Steve landed hard and rolled, arching to take in as much air as he could and coughing it back up with an ugly bark. He was dizzy, and as his eyes focused he realized he could see the bullet he'd fired above him. It wasn't frozen in place, but was very slowly spinning. 

Steve stared at it as he fought to breathe, remembering the angry Frenchman that had nearly strangled him after he'd saved his life. Who's ungrateful ass he'd tried to kick to the curb before they both realized they were surrounded. The man who'd been tied to him and marched into an internment camp where they'd been starved and forced to watch the other be tortured. For information, for names and locations, for everything. It took two weeks for Chief to break them out and neither of them had said anything to the Russians. Neither of them broke. The only ones they'd spoken to were each other. 

"I want to hate you." Ares nearly whispers, and Steve lays on the unforgiving floor of the plane and smells the memory of wet straw, dried blood and mold. "I know you do." He replied automatically and shivered, curling into himself and closing his eyes. The plane shuddered again and rumbled louder before settling, the sound of metal scraping on metal.

There was a shuffling sound of movement and when it stopped, Steve opened his eyes to see Marcos, laying before him in a mirroring position. The coat was gone, and his clothes were thin and dirty and blood soaked, making him look much smaller than he'd been before. He reached forward and placed a hand on Steve's chest, touch gentle once again, and Steve reciprocated. It was the same. When they weren't trying to kill each other, they were clinging desperately like that breath would be their last.

"I never forgave myself for letting you go. For letting you save me." Steve admitted, knowing he'd already said this to Sir Patrick without ever knowing who he was really speaking to. The man had been so kind, like he had really understood. He was the only person he'd talked to about Marcos and now he finally knew why. The man didn't reply, his brown, human eyes looking sad and regretful again. 

"Is she killing you, down there? Her mother...the other Amazons...they called her sword the God Killer. Does it work? Does the God Killer kill you?"

"Yes." Marcos says simply and Steve's fingers start to clench in the dirty shirt. He pulls himself closer.

"You stopped the plane...but it isn't really stopped, is it. It's going to explode. With me in it."

"Yes." He choked on the repeated word and Steve saw that same face that he had committed to memory. The sorrow seen through the filthy glass of a gas mask and poisoned smoke.

"So we die. Here. Like we thought we would a hundred times, but now for real." Steve said softly, and memories flooded through him of everything they'd shared. The nightmares, the anxiety, the kinship.

"No."

The word was spoken with dismay. "I have died many times and in many ways." Marcos hesitated, pursing his lips and Steve followed the movement. "Like Diana-" he said sadly. "I will continue on."

Steve was surprised, but then, he assumed he probably shouldn't be by now. 

"No mask this time, huh." He smiled sadly, despite it all, and Marcos pulled forward until their foreheads touched. Diana would live. Marcos would. It didn't matter that they were gods, good people deserved to live. 

"I would hold you here forever if I could. I would set the heavens ablaze, for you...but you always beat me to it." 

Steve didn't see Ares anymore. His hands moved to Marcos' face and pulled them together, his lips parting to feel and taste and remember. He was going to die, he already knew that. Had known it when he realized they couldn't just land the plane. The thought burned through him and he surged forward, kissing like his life depended on it because it did. Because Marcos had been dead and he'd never admitted how much that had affected him. How much he'd missed fighting and surviving and just fucking touching him. They could never have stayed together, it wasn't acceptable to find pleasure in such things, and now Steve knew why Marcos had never really cared. He'd always just thought it was because he was French. 

The thought made him happy and sad at the same time and he whimpered, causing Marcos to pull him flush and turn them so that Steve was laying atop him. Time was coming back, he could feel it, but he ground his hips into the thigh of a god and couldn't believe how inappropriately timed and hot that was. Steve gasped for air, his neck sore and his lungs heaving but Marcos' hands moved to his hips and held him in place. 

"Would you have told me?" Steve ground out as Marcos pushed himself upwards. Arousal shot up his spine and he barely swallowed back a cry. Heat was everywhere, and back in Marcos' eyes where it had never really left. 

"You would not have believed me, before finding her." He replied, hands reaching up to rip the buttons on Steve's shirt and touch skin. It was scalding, leaving red trails across his skin that burned black, then faded into pale flesh. Steve couldn't have stopped his cry if he'd wanted to. 

"If you had done shit like this I would have, you French bastard." And it fell from his lips so easily, and so quickly that he didn't realize until after he'd said it. How long it had been, how familiar this was, from deep in the trenches of war when they could barely afford a sound. Because he'd been mourning this man for years and suddenly, here he was. Not a man at all. 

Steve leaned down and kissed him, hard, not caring if he hurt or if he was gentle or if he'd ever feel another fucking thing for the rest of his life. Because this was it. This was the rest of his life. He rutted helplessly before Marcos reached a hand between them and squeezed, that otherworldly heat sending him over with a sob and his fists pounding loudly into the floor on either side of Marcos' head.

For a moment they held still and breathed in each other's space, close but distant. Relieved but devastated. Steve arched his aching body upwards, suddenly aware of how badly it all hurt after so much. So much fighting, so much desperation. So much war. 

But War himself was looking at him like he knew what he was thinking, and Steve suddenly couldn't begin to imagine how sick of it he must be. 

"Will I remember you, where I'm going? Will I miss you?" He asked solemnly, and Marcos; Ares, shook his head. 

"You won't know sadness anymore. You will know only peace."

"How do you know?"

"It is the only place such a thing exists. And the only place I can never go."

Steve leaned back down and pressed their foreheads together, bringing his hands to cup Ares' head as he felt trembling fingers clench into his hips. The propellers started to move and the rumbling of the plane was growing steadily louder. Time was catching up to him, the bullet was moving. 

"Can you stay?" Steve gasped, his breathing suddenly staggered and painful, the seconds filling him with fear. "Do you have to leave the plane before time moves again, or...or will this hurt you?"

Ares moved his hands to Steve's head and held them together. The engine began to roar, the sky was moving faster and the bullet descended, closer and closer to its target. 

"As many times as I have come back to this moment, it will always hurt me."

There was a loud, clanging sound, inconceivable heat, and Steve forgot about war.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm not apologizing for this. In fact, I'm more annoyed that there aren't more fics of this pairing. I regret nothing. Fight me.


End file.
